


Rosemary

by ackermom



Category: Redwall Series - Brian Jacques
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, post Mossflower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-02 20:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13326120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ackermom/pseuds/ackermom
Summary: In the darkness of Brockhall's ancient corridors, he felt another breed of unsettling anxiety stirring up inside his heart: something deep and brooding, something that craved fresh air and sunlight. He was not meant to kept in the dark like a prisoner.





	Rosemary

**Author's Note:**

> for remembrance

When Martin woke on the banks of the river, he could hardly remember the battle. His body was lashed with stitches and his paws shook with every movement. It would be weeks before he could walk again, months before he would regain his full strength, and even longer before he discovered what he was missing. There was a part of him that was gone after that battle, a time of his life that had been lost in blood.

It was Columbine who made him first remember that there was something he couldn't remember. Winter was melting in Mossflower, and they had taken to walking in the woods. They traded their strengths as the season went on. Martin regained the feeling her feet, and Columbine wrapped her arms carefully around her pregnant belly. She made a joke one day when he tripped over a snow-capped: about a time when he had fallen flat on his face, and he turned back to her, bemused.

"Don't you remember?" she laughed as he helped her through the snow. "It was during the early days, after we had gone to see Chibb for the first time. You've still got the scar on your chin from where you whacked it against the kitchen floor."

He rubbed his chin absentmindedly, expecting her to be pulling a trick on him. But he felt the telltale bridge of a scar beneath his fur, and he frowned. He didn't remember.

"It's been a long year," Columbine said when he confessed that. "I wouldn't worry about it." 

But she was a sister of Loamhedge, a practiced healer, and he recognized the flicker of concern in her eyes. 

 

 

 

 

 

The snow melted and nurtured the ground where spring flowers began to grow. Martin could wrap his paws around the hilt of his sword again without losing his grip. He sparred with Amber on the clearing by the bank. She fought carefully, quietly, as though each press of her boot into the ground sprung up a pool of his blood; but his battle with Tsarmina seemed a distant dream, and he moved swiftly across the field, defending against each of her blows with increasing ease. 

Construction on the quarry began when the spring rains ceased. Everyday the vision for their abbey became clearer and clearer, and soon a name began to form in their minds, as brilliant sandstone rock was unearthed and heaved to the surface.

Martin carried sandstone slabs with the rest of them until a scar on his chest split open, and Bella confined him and his stitches to Brockhall for the rest of the season. He felt restless, helpless, as his friends carried on working to build the dream he had designed. His worries were only softly quelled by their reassurances. 

But in the darkness of Brockhall's ancient corridors, when he could do nothing but lie back and stare at the ceiling, he felt another breed of unsettling anxiety stirring up inside his heart: something deep and brooding, something that craved fresh air and sunlight. He was not meant to be kept in the dark like a prisoner, and he escaped with glee was soon as his healing progress was approved by the abbess.

The scar was an old wound, from a broadsword at short range. He must have fought someone in close combat, someone he hated enough to risk a blade to the heart, someone who was worth killing. He couldn't remember. 

 

 

 

 

 

It was Gonff who noticed next. Who else had shared so much with Martin, and who else could know that there were still pieces of him missing?

Little Gonflet was born at the tail end of spring, as life was renewed across the land. He came in the morning with the sunrise, howling with tears. By afternoon, he had settled into a sleeping bundle in his parents' arms, loved and blessed. By evening, he was pressed into Martin's shaking cradle for the first time. Martin was nervous, incredibly so, but the babe instantly fell asleep against his heartbeat.

"Are you sure you haven't done this before?" Gonff joked through a yawn.

"I don't think so," Martin said softly. He sat back in the old rocking chair and was silent for a moment, watching Gonflet slumber, before he furrowed his brow. "I don't know."

Gonff said nothing. Rarely did he choose silence over words, but when he did, it was the wiser choice. Some things are better left unsaid.

Martin had been so sure that he had never held an infant before, so certain that it had taken six tries to convince him he would not hurt the babe. But his paws felt different afterwards, and he was sure, now, that it had not been the first time. He had seen this miracle of perseverance before, this bright life birthed into a dark world. Yet he could not remember where, when, who.

His arms burned through the night, as if trying to tell him something. When he woke in the daylight, the sun just rising over the top of the woods, he held his paws up to the light and saw the faint burns on his wrists, the scars of hopelessness. He had seen these scars on Timballisto. He had seen these scars on every slave aboard that ship. 

 

 

 

 

 

If he were braver, he might choose to share his suffering. If he were kinder, he might wallow in pain alone. But a great sob of questions wells in Martin's throat, and he forgoes bravery and kindness to hurl those questions at sandstone walls, to lose himself in the brutality of construction. He works twice as hard as any beast and ignores their calls for rest. 

It is not the shame of being a slave that eats at him. It is not the pain he must have endured or the pain he must have lost. It is the questions. Already he knows so little about his father, about his tribe up north, and now the doubts pile on top of each other, one after another. How was he captured? When? What happened to his grandmother, her poor forgotten name floating somewhere on the wind? Did his father know? How old was he? How long was he there? And the most burning question of all: how did it end? 

These questions come to a shattering standstill when Bella asks him idly how he thought to carry bricks using rolling logs. His mouth goes dry and he feels the phantom crack of a whip across his back. He has always known that those scars were there, but he has never seen them. He can barely touch them, his paws contorted backwards over his shoulders to traced the long, contorted lines of lightning burned skin. 

"It was just a thought," lies Martin. "I don't know where it came from." 


End file.
